Psychological Momentum
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Abstract
Our mental experience is largely continuous on the scale of seconds and minutes. However, this continuity does not always arise from a volitional carrying forward of ideas. Instead, recent actions, thoughts, dispositions, and emotions can persist in mind, continually shaping our later experience. Aspects of this fundamental property of human cognition—psychological momentum—have been studied under the rubrics of mindset, mood, memory, task set, and mind wandering. Reviewing these largely independent threads of research, we argue that psychological momentum needs to be understood from an integrated perspective as an adaptation that, although sometimes costly, carries forward thoughts and dispositions that respond to the current and future environment.